pfeaster wrote:One intriguing hypothesis these observations suggest to me is that the default behavior of
Voynichese really is to repeat by looping in particular predictable ways. The less information any
given sequence encodes—which is to say, the less entropy it displays—the more closely it would then
conform to these default loops, and the more conspicuously repetitive it might appear. Conversely, the
more information it encodes, the more the looping pattern might give way to meaningful signal.
I fully agree.
In general, any repetitive activity with little built-in constraints will eventually evolve into a more predictable routine, according to personal preferences and optimizations.
The best analogy that I could imagine is walking in a garden and picking flowers. There is a huge number of ways to traverse the garden: the choice to remain on the beaten paths or stray off the paths and find shortcuts is almost entirely free, within physical limitations and obstacles that could impose constraints in some areas: walls, a hedge maze, forbidden directions, etc. A full record of the activity would only need to describe the path, if flowers are picked any time they are encountered on the path. In the context of a cipher this means picking plaintext letters in the correct order, not flowers of course.
